Unsupported Speculation

Spoiler: Darwin’s “Origin of the Species”

You read the spoiler, so I’ll get straight to the point: Charles Darwin was HOT! He was like Wiz Khalifa or Britney Spears! Nobody could stop talking about him or thinking about him!

When someone’s ideas are that famous, then because they are thought about by so many people living and working in many different segments of society, and the ideas undergo a kind of evolution themselves…

You see, an individual’s unique perspective influences their interpretation of someone else’s ideas, and you almost can’t avoid superimposing your own life experience into someone else’s work.

Further, as ideas are thought about more and more, they change, and become something different than the first time you heard about them, as well as the second time you recall them and think about them again, and so on and so forth. The more iterations something continues to be thought about, the more they evolve.

Among the many different sectors of English society that were thinking about Darwin were officers in the British Royal Navy. Well, one thing led to another, and they inevitably decided that English culture and blood was superior to all others. This fit in neatly with their military tasking to establish and defend the British Colonial Empire, and so this application of Darwin’s ideas met little resistance.

And sometime during all of this, one British navy officer was thinking to himself in his cabin about Darwin and the superiority of (British) mankind, and he was searching for examples of what makes human beings higher than lowly animals, and what he arrived at was TEAMWORK.

You see, on a ship, sometimes a certain task is so complicated and potentially hazardous that it requires multiple people doing different things in pursuit of the same goal. Thus, all assigned crew need to be coordinated in order to complete this single task to avoid things getting damaged and/or members of the crew getting injured.

This officer wanted to find a way to marry this officer leadership concept to Charles Darwin, and came up with the term “Shipboard Evolution”, and this term STILL survives to this day in the English-speaking maritime world.